For the first lecture of the series, Maki Fumihiko and Tominaga Yuzuru talked about their experiences of Le Corbusier, comparing Le Corbusier's early “white box” architecture to his later works, and touching on a wide range of topics, including the characteristics and common features of each period.

Maki studied architecture in Japan under Tange Kenzo at the beginning of the 1950s, then went on to Harvard University in the U.S.A. At Harvard, he came into contact with many people who talked of Le Corbusier, including professors who had learned directly from him, so Le Corbusier was a constant topic of conversation. This was a period when architects around the world keenly awaited each new Le Corbusier creation, and Maki's own interest dates back to this time he spent in the States. Maki's first trip to see Le Corbusier's works was at the end of the 1950s, when he went to Ahmedabad in India. Waking up in the morning and looking out of the hotel window, the Millowners' Association Building was straight in front of him, just across the river. From there, he took a train to Chandigarh, which was still under construction. By coincidence, Le Corbusier himself was in Chandigarh at the time, and Maki was able to meet him at his studio. Maki had with him some of the plans that he was working on at the time, so he took the opportunity to show them to Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier advised him to take a freer approach with his columns. This was to be the only time that Maki met Le Corbusier in person. By that point, Le Corbusier was already becoming an almost mythological figure, the stuff of legend. He was actually a simplistic person, but he frequently complained about how brutal life could be. Certainly, his life rarely played out the way he desired it, and he was always dissatisfied to some extent, but he was also the sort of person who could turn that dissatisfaction into the energy to fight for what he wanted.

Next, Tominaga Yuzuru described what triggered his own fascination for Le Corbusier. Tominaga learned of Le Corbusier while still in his second year at university, but at first he held no special interest. Then, after working for five years in an architect's practice and going independent, he took to reading a collection of Le Corbusier works each day, and discovered an inexhaustible stream of ideas. He started to create 1:50 scale models of some of Le Corbusier's works, and after making models for about a year, made his first attempts to design actual houses based on what he had learned from Le Corbusier's house designs. Adding contemporary sensibility to Le Corbusier's architectural vocabulary brought the satisfaction of being able to create something new.

Le Corbusier described Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut, Ronchamp (1950-55) as addressing the landscapes around it by an acoustical phenomenon brought into the realm of forms. It was created from an awareness of the effect that the architecture would have on the land and space around it; conceived with consideration for the topography and environment. Ronchamp was Le Corbusier's first work to incorporate the history and land as such important elements, but Tominaga suggested that it may mark a return to the memories and ideas embodied in sketches from his Voyage d'Orient (1911), drawn when he was still only 24 years old. With Couvent St. Marie de La Tourette (1953-60), Le Corbusier made the land float up, topped with a work that seems to give form to human nature. As a monastery, it was a place where individuals without families lived in an extreme manner, but it was also a place for communal living. The rigor that lies behind the idealization of such a fundamental society is conveyed by this architecture. Église Saint-Pierre, Firminy (1960-2006) was completed more than 40 years after Le Corbusier's death by an architect who had worked with him on the project. Le Corbusier's own drawings were the basis for the design. Each of these three religious works has its own character, with Ronchamp distinguished by its irregular form, La Tourette by its right angles, and Église Saint-Pierre by its verticality.

Le Petit Cabanon, Cap-Martin (1951-52) was constructed as a birthday present for Le Corbusier's wife. It is less than four meters by four meters in size, and inside you feel at one with the space, cozily protected by the architecture. In his later years, Le Corbusier came here to think about concepts and designs for his work. Le Corbusier completed Petite villa au bord du lac Léman (1925) for his parents at about the same time as Villa La Roche-Jeanneret, but architecturally, these two projects have totally different approaches. Perhaps this is an indication that the two different approaches had always been part of his make-up. Petite Villa au bord du lac Léman has a very simple appearance, but is actually very innovative. Unlike the very artistic buildings of his white period, it conveys an emotional warmth and makes full use of universal knowledge about houses. Thirty years after its construction, Le Corbusier described its significance in Une petite maison, published at a time when he was working on Ronchamp. Villa La Roche-Jeanneret (1923-25), from his white box period, is the work that brought general recognition for Le Corbusier's architecture. Displaying hints of influence from his voyage to the East, it is artistic architecture that unifies an old space with a new one, creating signs that portend the birth of something new. An interesting point emerging from the lecture was that while the windows of his white period predominantly focus on the outside, enabling views from inside the architecture, in Le Corbusier's later designs the focus is inside the architecture, with windows permitting the outside to infiltrate.

Maki and Tominaga's lecture eventually became quite animated, talking about the suggestion that the composition of Le Corbusier's white villas comes down to the issue of how to link together simple spaces, and discussing whether the Voyage d'Orient left its impression on the white villas as well as on his later works. Did that voyage leave him with an essential feel for architectural spaces created with ancient human knowledge before being influenced by a variety of different forms of culture? Did his ideas and imagination reach as far as contemporary houses, high-rise housing, and the cities that high-rise housing produce? What made Le Corbusier great was that at the same time as reproducing the universal, he created a whole new architectural language and brought architecture into the modern age. With that thought, the lecture came to an end.